Hello Cloud Gurus.
This has been a rather tumultuous month for the Google Cloud Platform with both
good news and bad news.
Google has announced multiple new regions around the world,
released several products into general availability and whether the largest
Layer 7 distributed denial of service attack ever seen. Unfortunately,
they've also made a lot of people, very worried,
maybe even more worried than in March when they announced the price increases,
that will happen in September. So should you be worried?
Let's find out I'm Mattias Andersson and you're watching GCP this month.
Okay. We'll get to all the happy news in a bit,
but we need to start with the elephant in the room.
Google is killing off GCP's IoT Core product.
Customers were informed by email that they will have to migrate their internet
of things devices, and systems to something other than GCP.
Before they stop working on August 16th, 2023,
a few Google partners have stepped forth to offer their services to those
orphaned by Google's decision. But so far,
the only support Google has officially promised is information.
And it seems like they expect customers to figure out and perform those
migrations themselves. But wait, you might say,
I thought they promised not to do stuff like this just last year. Well, yes,
it has been barely a year since Google loudly proclaimed their API stability
commitment about which Google said. And I quote, "The burden is on us.
Our working principle is that no feature may be removed or changed in a way that
is not backwards compatible for as long as customers are actively using it.
"If a deprecation or breaking change is inevitable,
then the burden is on us to make the migration as effortless as possible.
The only exception to this rule is if there are critical security,
legal or intellectual property issues caused by the feature,"
but there is a catch. And I quote again, "Google enterprise APIs,
a label applied to the vast majority of APIs across Google Cloud."
Vast majority is not all.
And apparently it does not cover this IoT Core product,
no matter how core it might seem.
Not that you should feel bad for missing that little detail though,
because very few people have studied Google's API library.
Well enough to know at just a mention,
which of the hundreds of APIs are included and which aren't and Google hasn't
really done anything to make things clear when letting people know about this
new deprecation, either in fact,
their messaging's been so bad that the email Google sent to IoT Core customers
to inform them of this deprecation still takes the same rather callous form that
ex-Googler Steve Yegge had absolutely roasted them about two years
and one day earlier.
Didn't anyone from Google read his rant and realize how poorly they had been
communicating? Frankly, it's embarrassing,
but alright let's switch to looking at why this might not warrant quite as much
concern as many seem to have about it. First,
although the overall communication has been terrible.
I admit I did find one statement that conveyed some actual empathy for
customers. A direct response to tech crunch reporter Ron Miller,
where the unnamed spokesperson from Google said, "Since launching IoT Core,
it has become clear that our customers' needs could be better served by our
network of partners that specialize in IOT applications and services.
We have worked extensively to provide customers with migration options and
solution alternatives and are providing a yearlong runway before IoT Core is
discontinued." And to be honest,
it seems like many of the IoT Core customers were already moving to other
platforms even before the deprecation was announced as the register reporter
Lindsay Clark put it, "Customers may be disappointed,
but there also may not be that many of them.
One measure by marketing analysis website enlyft put Google Cloud's share of the
IoT managed service market at less than 1%.
The Google service claims 72 customers," it said. Though,
I will point out that this 72 customers has to be a lower bound and not an upper
one.
But the customers it did have had to be very patient as well because there have
been no updates to IoT Core since early 2019,
leaving it rather feature poor. But for the sake of your system,
your sanity, and maybe your job,
please double and triple check that all of the GCP APIs that you are
using are marked with that Google enterprise API label.
And if you find that you're using anything that isn't blessed with that API
stability, commitment, at least start thinking about an exit plan. Okay.
That was really important to cover, but I am now very tired of this topic.
So let's move on to the good news, eh? And this one really is a gem.
Google has just published a blog post describing how Cloud Armor an important
part of GCP,
handily blocked the largest Layer 7 distributed denial of service or DDoS attack
that the world has ever seen.
The actual attack happened on June 1st and it peaked at 46 million
requests per second.
But because the GCP customer had configured Cloud Armor with its adaptive
protection functionality and accepted its recommendation to block,
it just kinda sloughed it off. No big deal,
even though that was more than 8,000 times,
the average traffic for all of Wikipedia. Anyway,
you can read more about the anatomy of the attack and response at the blog post
we'll link in the video description.
It's valuable to have a good sense for things like these,
partly because they reinforce how important it is to have access to the
innovations from planet scale engineering teams, like the ones at Google. Okay.
Now let's move on to this. Month's quick bites. Chomp Chomp.
Google has recently announced that they will be building new Google Cloud
regions in Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand.
These are in addition to the ones they've previously announced coming to Berlin,
Dammam, Doha, Tel Aviv,
and Turin plus the one coming to Mexico that Jean Tunis told you about last
month. This month,
Google has released a bunch of new things into general availability,
including Big Lake, Google Cloud Certificate Manager,
Virtual Machine Threat Detection, and the second generation of Cloud Functions.
This is in addition to the three Dataflow releases that went GA late last month,
being Dataflow Prime, Dataflow Go, and Dataflow ML,
check out the links in the description to read more about all of these and to
find out about the extra features that were released along with these services
going GA.
Our last story this month is that Pub/Sub has a new BigQuery subscription that
avoids the need for Dataflow.
When you just wanna shuffle the data across without fuss,
using this new feature can reduce both the latency and cost.
So it's a double win. Now that we're at the end of this video,
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Take care of those around you and keep being awesome.